School of Humans filth heads.

I'm back, You're back, We're all back.

I hope you've had a good summer.

Has anything bad happened since I've been gone anything?

Ah, If something bad has happened, I have returned to cheer your eardrums on Fridays with a distasteful tale of your and this verse tale who It is a doozy because this story isn't filthy fun.

What it does instead is it exposes the importance of checking your work before you publish it, because if you don't spell check or fact check your news article, it might result in a truly terrible error, one that a morally dubious and lazy historian like myself might see one hundred years later and uncontrollably laugh at despite the horribleness of the content.

But I get it.

Surprisingly, I am not perfect, and I have indeed published incorrect work.

Gasp.

I've mispronounced words, I've gotten things out of order, accidentally said that Thomas Jefferson became president in nineteen oh one instead of eighteen oh one.

But the biggest.

Mistake I've ever made in my quasi journalistic career was on a true crime show.

I was a producer, and I accidentally reported that someone was dead who was in fact not dead at all.

Turns out, in small town Arkansas, some people have the same name, and one can be dead and one can be alive.

I'm just saying, if you're gonna look at obituaries, make sure it's the right obituary for the right person.

But guys, if I'm gonna be truly honest, did that dead man and the alive man have the exact same name?

No, but it was close.

Anyway.

Let's head to Chicago.

In the gloomy winter of nineteen twenty one when there's a grisly murder, a murder that the newspaper the Kansas City Cans and reported on with a spelling error that made me laugh when I saw it, even though the story is absolutely horrendous.

Cue the theme song.

This is American Filth and I'm Gabby Watts.

Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history.

This week's episode, a nineteen twenty one newspaper accidentally makes child murder haleaneus.

I didn't really hide that time.

President Trump, our dumbass in chief, recently put the National Guard on the ground of Washington, DC, and now he wants to do that in Chicago.

He says these places are riddled with crime, when in fact crime is at a record low.

But when fascism is the fashion.

Of the day, facts are out.

But if mister Trump wanted to go back in time to when America was allegedly great, he might find all the crime he's looking for.

In the early twentieth century, Chicago had a large number of homicides.

In general violence.

Why well, they were crazier by no.

Well.

With prohibition passed in nineteen twenty, the underground alcohol trade boomed, and the trade was run by powerful gangs with famous people like al Capone.

A question about al Capone.

If he was Italian, really his last name should be Capone.

But again that's neither hither nor thither.

The gangs of Chicago vied for power and control over alcohol.

The period from nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty three was dubbed the Beer Wars, and hundreds of gangsters were trying to become the number one bootlegger.

What a serious war, a beer war.

These gangs were dangerous because they had all these new weapons that had come out of World War One.

They had the Tommy gun, which is a semi machine gun that can shoot off fifty rounds at a time.

Also, gangs started using bombs.

They'd go and just bomb the supply of their competitors storefronts.

It was a bomb's bonanza.

And during Prohibition homicides of Chicago increased by twenty one percent, So I think it's fair to say it was a stressful time.

Even if you weren't in the gangs.

You're just surrounded by bombs and guns and violence.

And now you're like, what does this have to do with that terrible spellcheck error?

Well, I'm getting there, have patience.

I was just trying to explain what was happening in Chicago around December nineteen twenty one, because that's when newspapers started reporting on a child who had brutally died, and the spellcheck error was in the newspaper, the Kansas City, Kansas, and it came out on December one, nineteen twenty one.

The story was issued by the United Press, which was kind of like the Associated Press today, where they create new stories that different newspapers can print in their papers.

But it didn't feature byline, so you don't know who actually reported and wrote it, and now I think I've built it up enough.

Let me just read you the article.

I think you will quickly identify what they misspelled que creepy true crime music.

The body of Margaret Coughlin, three years old, kidnapped Wednesday, was found today, dismembered and partly burned in the basement of a neighbor's home.

The body of the neighbor, Missus Penis, fifty two years old, was found in her bedroom with her throat cut from ear to ear and a bloody butcher knife in her hand.

Police believe missus Penis had killed the child and then committed suicide.

Missus Penis was fond of children, according to neighbors, and often expressed a desire to have babies.

Of her own.

Parents of the baby said Missus Penis frequently asked them to allow the child to come over for a while.

Police believe missus Penis had Margaret in her home since the girl disappeared.

An all night search was led by Margaret's father, Edward Coughlin.

A policeman.

Efforts of the police to gain admittance to the Penis home failed, they smashed the door.

The search on the second floor revealed the body of Missus Penis in the basement.

Parts of Margaret's body were found strewn about.

The body had been hacked into several pieces, and some parts wrapped in bundles.

Some parts of the body, a.

Leg and an arm, were found charred in a copper boiler.

The fire under the boiler was out.

The basement was splattered with blood and with shredded garments of Margaret.

Okay, let's just let's pause for a second.

First of all, this article and the murder it describes are absolutely horrific.

A child died and was dismembered, and then the likely perpetrator committed suicide, slitting her own throat with a knife.

Truly a terrible thing happened.

But also, you guys, understand what the spelling error was.

The newspaper reported the perpetrator's name was Missus Penis.

Missus Penis, no first name, simply Missus Penis of the Penis household.

When I first read this article, I thought I was being bamboozled by the universe.

I was like, is that someone's real name?

It certainly can't be.

And then I was wondering, like, was Penis a common surname back in the day?

I hope not, because penis that's been used to describe male genital since the like seventeenth century.

That'd be so silly to have a last named penis.

So to see if there were more penises out there, penis people, I went to newspapers dot com and searched the word penis from the years eighteen ninety to nineteen forty, just to see if this was a common name, you know, and I hardly found anybody with the last named Penis.

There are a lot of approximants, like I found an obituary for a woman who had the last name Poenix with an ex at the end.

There's a lot of pennies, a penis stin, a penis, sten penis, penry, penal, piniata.

The only other penis I.

Found was a twenty one year old man named Dennis Penis who died in a car crash in Hawaii in the nineteen sixties.

So only one penis and that similar timeframe in which missus Penis would have been alive.

I also looked at some census data on ancestry dot com.

Apparently there was a Lowess Penis in nineteen thirty and Andrew Penis in eighteen twenty, and the website said the most penis families were found in the USA in eighteen eighty.

And I know what you're thinking.

I do such important work for this show, but I wasn't the only person asking these questions about penis.

A reporter for Pacific Standard went on the hunt for people named penis after he saw that baby names dot Com had indicated that about a dozen children had been named penis in twenty ten.

By the results, that actually wasn't true.

The reporter couldn't find a single penis in the wild.

And here's another historically rigorous question.

When this article appeared in the Kansas City Cans and would the name penis be considered humorous?

Now, as I said, the word's been around for a while, but I contend that it probably was a little silly.

It probably was pretty funny.

Because in the nineteen twenties, that was the time of flappers.

People were being more promiscuous in general with their petting parties and drinking illegal booze, and people back then in general seem to be more okay with dirty jokes.

So if someone read this article in December nineteen twenty one, they might have left they might have thought it was a terrible, horrible, shocking name for such a terrible crime.

By me, I'm it probably depended on the person, you know, which I mean, that's a really astute historical observation.

I'm like, Wow, people are different.

People aren't a monolith.

Incredible, But I quickly discovered that Penis was a very unfortunate spell check error.

This child was not murdered by someone named missus Penis.

And also some people think the toddler wasn't even.

Murdered at all.

Be right back after these soothing advertisements.

Four days after the article came out about a Missus Penis who murdered a child and then killed herself, the United Press circulated another article, but the alleged murderer she was no longer missus Penis.

Instead, it appears that someone did some actual journalism and identified her with her actual name, missus Rachel Pences.

That's pe n Ses.

Honestly, that's not even that close to Penis.

Like, there's those other people I listed pnix Penal Penal Pences.

Ah.

They mis hear that the article clarified some details around the alleged kidnap and murder and what happened afterwards.

The day before.

Margaret's dismembered body was found, she had gone over to the Pence's home to play, but her parents became alarmed later in the day when she never returned home.

Remember, her father was a police officer, so a search of the neighborhood began really quickly.

The Coughlin parents questioned Missus Pences about Margaret's whereabouts, and Missus Pences said that Margaret had felt sick while playing at her house and had gone home The next morning.

It was Margaret's dad, the policeman, who saw a thin wisp of smoke coming from the Pence's home.

Which was odd for the time of day.

He crashed down the door.

After Margaret Coughlin and Rachel Pence's were found dead, Missus Pence's husband and two preteen daughters were taken into custody.

They all said they.

Knew absolutely nothing about what was going on, and the two daughters even asserted that their mother was very fond of Margaret and would not have killed her.

And this is when it gets intriguing because the article proposes a theory that maybe Missus Pence's didn't kill the kid on purpose, but it was an accident, it reads.

The theory was that missus Pence's had given the Coughlin baby poison, which she had mistaken for medicine, and then had become frightened and attempted to conceal the child.

This theory was supported by mister Pencs' statements that his wife had told him the Coughlin baby had become ill when at the Pence's home on Wednesday, So if that theory was true, that would have meant that missus Rachel Pence's, not Penis, had accidentally poisoned the child on Wednesday, and instead of reporting it to anyone, she decided to conceal the body and lie to her family and to the Coughlins.

And then the next morning, after her husband and daughters had left for the day, she tried to destroy the body by burning it after she dismembered part of it, but once she knew she was found out, she killed herself by slicing her throat with a butcher knife.

So yeah, this theory says maybe it was an accidental death, but I think we can also say that missus Pence's was not acting like a normal person at all, and that's when the article dropped another huge reveal about Missus Pence's not Penis.

It reads, Missus.

Rachel Pensis, who kidnapped and brutally murdered three year old Margaret Coughlin, was demented according to criminal three months ago, the woman was declared a moron after examination by attendance at the psychopathic laboratory of the city.

So yeah, the family of Missus Pences not Penis claimed that she was insane, and so maybe Rachel Pencis didn't kill Margaret by accident, but because she was having a psychotic episode.

Penises are crazy.

On December second, nineteen twenty one, the Chicago Tribune wrote a longer article about the Pences not Penis family and about Rachel Pinsis's alleged struggles.

The article is titled woman fanatic, slew child and self police say, Scientists hold she had religious mania.

So in the article, her family claimed that Rachel Pensis was a quote religious lunatic, take to the point of mania and obeyed the commands of a.

Mysterious voice end quote.

They said that her religious mania made her quote nervous, irritable, accustomed to outbursts of violent anger over petty trifles.

She would magnify small incidents occurring about the house into the wildest of imaginary tales.

Damn, I think I might have religious mania too, because I'd be accustomed to outbursts of violent anger over petty trifles all the time.

But anyway, then it said missus Pences had been obsessed with the three year old Margaret.

She always wanted to hold her and take care of her, now Rachel Pensis, she had two daughters of her own, but according to the article, she also had three other children who died in infancy.

So the article suggested she killed young Margaret as.

Some sort of trauma response.

They quoted some physicians in the article that basically said women are crazy.

They were like, yeah, moms have been known to go insane and kill their offspring.

That's what women do.

Women be shopping, women be killing babies.

That's just how it is.

Now, let's get to this voice that missus Pence's might have heard.

Physicians hypothesized that Missus Pences heard a voice in her head and that was what made her kill the girl.

Like, oh, she heard this voice.

She thinks it's the voice of God.

So this is why the Chicago Tribune proposed they're like, well, Margaret Coughlin is over at the Pence's house playing with missus Pencis's eleven year old daughter, Josephine, and then that's when she heard a voice in her head that said kill the girl.

So she sent her daughter on an errand that took about an hour, and that's what missus Pence's did the deed, and then.

Hid Margaret's body.

When her daughter Josephine returned, she told her that Margaret had gone home.

And doctor suggested that missus Pences had been induced into a mannicked state, which continued throughout the night and into the next day.

That made her seem normal to everyone, even though she had done something truly horrific.

One doctor who has quoted in the article said very ominously, and if she had succeeded in this crime, it would have only been a space of time until it would have been repeated, probably with her own family as the victims.

Dun Dun Dunn.

Missus Pence's daughters and husband were eventually released from jail, but not before the Chicago Tribune made a brutal assessment about the husband.

The article said, quote.

He too is slightly he mentally disordered.

His glib speech, his vacuous smile as he tells of the actions on the night before in the early morning of yesterday are plainly indicative.

I think this quote is nasty.

They're like reading him for filth.

But he's just been through a lot, Like his wife killed a child and then killed herself by slitting her own throat.

Also, he's been dealing with years of her having this religious mania, Like I can't.

I don't think he's in a good place, you know.

I think he's probably pretty stressed.

Like instead of saying he's mentally disordered, why don't you get.

Him a fucking therapist.

Chicago Tribune, Fuck you, guys.

I'm gonna send them an email.

It's like, more than one hundred years ago, you were mean to this man.

Anyway.

The article ends dramatically at the Coughlin home, a red eyed man and sits with the eighteen months old brother of little Margaret in a creaky rocking chair, talking in a low tone of his dead baby's charms.

And in the next room, the mother lies in a coma on a bed, the coma of hysteria.

A doctor watches.

The case is very serious, Okay, clearly this murder was horrific, leaving two families in absolute shambles.

So that's why it's so crazy, so cuckoo bananas that the first article about this had the error of penis buddy boy.

Let's get a fact checker, Let's get a freaking editor in there.

I need to send them an email to complaining.

There's so many complaints I have.

But unfortunately, here's the thing.

The United Press, from where this article came.

I was bought by the AP, the Associated Press in nineteen ninety nine, and honestly I would feel pretty silly sending them an email.

I would I can't.

I don't know if I should besmirch my reputation with the AP by sending an email asking do you know who wrote this article that said missus Penis killed a baby?

Do you know who wrote it?

So I can spit on their grave?

No, guys, I've made I mean, I told you guys about how I said a guy was dead when he wasn't dead.

You should also spit on my grave.

Also, here's another spooky thing.

I looked at the house where this took place in Chicago, and it's still there, and I was looking through like I think Zillow had some photos and they're really creepy because there's some people in the house, but there are faces where blurred.

I was like, are those ghosts?

Is this house filled with ghosts?

So maybe I'll email them and be like, hey, do you guys know that a child died in your house?

Actually?

Won't that's so that would be so rude, be like, hey, do you know your house is like haunted as hell?

Or maybe they already know.

Anyway, I'm not going to email anyone.

Actually, I've decided now.

I think you might be wondering.

You're probably like, Gabby, how did you find this incredible story?

It's so specific.

I don't think anyone's ever reported on this before.

Well, what I did is I was on newspapers dot com looking for stories and I typed in the word penis to see what would come up, and this would came up.

You gotta take the Internet away from me having too much fun.

So every episode of American Filth we learn a lesson, and obviously the moral to this one is spell check, fact check your work, especially if you're reporting on a brutal child murder.

Anyway, we'll be back next week with some more hot filthy content.

We got, But next week, no what we got.

We got a man cheating on his wife.

Can you believe it?

There's even more of them que the credits.

American Filth is a production of School of Humans and My Heart Podcast.

It's hosting written by Me, Gabby Watts, Jesse and I has longer than our beautiful theme song.

Our executive producers are Elsie Crowley, Virginia Prescott, and Brandon Barr and you can follow along with the show on Instagram at American Filth Pod.

I'm also this season trying to make American Filth chart above the Joe Rogan experience.

So please share this episode with your friends and families, and especially your enemies.

Let's take down the Joe Rogan experience and call her daddy and every other single show talk at you, guys next time.

School of Humans